5 July | Place Guillaume II (Knuedler) | Music Festival

One of my earliest festival experiences, many moons ago, took place in Phoenix Park racecourse in Dublin in the days when Bono was a boy and still sported what would now, quite rightly, be regarded as a criminally insane mullet. Now this was taking place around the time of the last great recession in Ireland (Hello again recession, soft day for a few home repossessions) and outside the festival site, the have-nots, as in have not ticket, and of whom there were many, were starting to build up around the perimeter fence of the racecourse. Like Colditz in reverse, a strategy developed whereby groups of people would break off to a place where there wasn’t any security, scramble under or over the fence and make a frantic, drunken yet heroic dash to lose themselves in the crowd before the bouncers arrived. Meanwhile, as the security men scrambled in hot pursuit to try and stem the intruders, they would leave a breach and a few more would sneak through where they had been. My recollection is that nobody asked me for a ticket, so I didn’t show them the one that I didn’t have.

On the bill that day were U2, Simple Minds and Eurythmics and my abiding memory of the day is standing with a beer, in a break between bands (after Simple Minds and before U2), and chatting to a very excited Scot. I told him I was looking forward to seeing U2.

“Aye, he said, but what aboot the mines?”
“Eh?”
“The mines, the mines, what aboot the mines???”

The miners strike had been over for a couple of years, he couldn’t still be going on about that, could he? Had they planted a minefield just inside the perimeter fence, to dissuade any miscreants? That, while a tad extreme, would have accounted for the lax security.

“Aye the mines, the mines, simple *#@£ing mines!”

The Mines, who are the only band that I can remember to do back-to-back-to-back gigs in den Atelier, finish off a night which maintains the Knuedler’s eclectic, not to say surprising, tradition.

Anyone remember Steve Cropper playing in the Blues Brothers Band a couple of years back?

Starts 14h30. FREE

The full line-up reads as follows;

Horse Stage
15h-15h30 Sug(r)cane
16h-16h30 Artaban
17h-17h30 Dandy Robots
18h-18h30 Minipli
19h0-19h30 très.b

Lion Stage
14h30-15h Quentin Lagonza
15h30-16h Mutiny On The Bounty
16h30-17h The Disliked
17h30-18h Daniel Balthasar
18h30-19h Spleen
19h30-20h Arno Carstens
20h30-21h30 Ray Wilson of Stilskin
22h-23h30 Simple Minds (The Mines)

Rock Am Knuedler - Simple Minds 9.5102